Bernie Sanders is running for president; will the sun set on the Patriot Act June 1?; legacy media and technology platforms have crawled into bed together and nobody knows what will happen next; and much, much more. Read More

Why the FCC balked at the Comcast-TimeWarner deal; Sheryl Sandberg wants Hillary Clinton to lean into the White House; the UK's Democracy Club brings a lot more information to election season; and much, much more. Read More

Wouldn't it be nice if there was only one day a year that people were wrong on the Internet? Unfortunately, that's simply not the case. And the problem doesn't stop with fake news. (Although that in itself is such a problem that The Washington Post puts out a fake news roundup every Friday.) There are more insidious problems in media: biased wording, overly general, overly simplistic or unsupported claims, and false assertions. These are just a few of the things that one can flag on the new social media platform, Fiskkit, which recently won the 2015 Launch Fest Social Impact Award. Read More

In 2013, Humera Khan, Executive Director of D.C.-based think tank Muflehun, watched as a teenager was radicalised and recruited on Twitter. “Over the course of two years,” she recently recounted for Foreign Affairs, “that individual went from an activist championing minority rights to supporting Jabhat al Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria), and in a final shift of allegiance, to one of the the largest distributors of ISIS propaganda. He is now in Syria.” Despite reporting the case to the law enforcement agencies in the United States, Khan says her warnings fell on deaf ears. But in the wake of a sophisticated online media campaign that includes a number of gruesome videos of beheadings, governments are starting to take the use of social media by groups such as ISIS more seriously.

A week ago, digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a talk here at Civic Hall on the topic of "Hypercivility." As you will see from watching the video, it's an extension of years of research and thinking he has done on the effects of hyperconnectivity on our world. Be forewarned, this is not an "easy" talk to watch or digest. While Pesce definitely has our social-media-powered "Age of Outrage" on his mind, he grounds his talk in a much more serious place: post-genocide Rwanda, which he recently visited. Read More